Most readers already know about Shaykh Ahmed Sirhindi
( d. 1624), the renewer of Islam for the second millenium who was greatlyconcerned
about the survival of the minority Indian Muslim community. He argued that
the Muslim community must be circumscribedby carefully defined rules of
orthodoxy and orthopraxy and the central government should support this
endeavor. As a result, his ideas contributed to the political re-shaping
of Islam in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. Arguably, Pakistan is the twentieth-century
politicaloutcome of a religious crystallization process initiated 350 years
previously.

If we do not know about Shaykh Sirhindi's work,
it is not because of dearth of worthwhile material in Persian. Of all theseventeenth-century charismatic leaders of India,
Shaykh Sirhindi was the most prolific. Much material in his seven epistles
andcollection of 536 letters expresses a deliberate
scheme to define the boundaries of the Indian Muslim community.

To date, no one has yet studied Shaykh Sirhindi's
role in formulating a Muslim orthodoxy and identity. In addition , the
651 collectedPersian and Arabic letters of Shaykh
Sirhindi's son and principal successor, Khwaja Muhammad Ma'sum ( d. 1668
), are an almost avirtually untouched source.
Both of these published sets of collected letters describe, both in theology
terms and in orthopraxical details,how Shaykh
Sirhindi and his successors proceeded to define Muslim identity in the
Indian environment.

There is a pressing need to make Shaykh Sirhindi's
corpus accessible to an English-speaking audience. Scholars have worked
on ShaykhSirhindi but none have really done
his work justice because of one serious problem: there are no scholarly
indexes to make the wholecorpus of his thought
accessible to a large audience. The first stage of Dr. Buehler's research
involves compilation of a scholarly index {hereafter
Master Index } which would include, Qur' anic and Hadith citations, names,
places, technical vocabulary, and topics discussed.First stage of research will take six to nine
months and a sum of $18,000 is provided by the Naqshbandia Foundation for
IslamicEducation to support Dr. Buehler's work.

The second stage of Dr. Buehler's research entails,
a selected translation and commentary on one crucial unstudied subject:
therelationship of credal dogma ( 'aqa' id )
and Sufism (tasawwuf) and how this crystallized the disparate Indian Muslim
community into the welldefined institution that
has survived into the twentieth century.

One can expect that the Master Index will spur
many scholarly studies of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi which will be of great
benefit to all, particularlythose whose homeland
is South Asia.

Dr. Arther Buehler is an Assistant Professor of
Religious Studies at Louisian State University, Baton Rouge. He did his
Ph.D in religion at Harvard in 1993. The title of his thesis was "Charisma
and Examplar: Naqshbandi Spiritual Authority in the Punjab ( 1857-1947
). Dr.Buehler is also author of Sufi Heirs of
the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi
Shaykh. In this book, he looksspecifically at
the role of Jama'at Ali Shah (d. 1951) to explain current Naqshbandi practices.
For more information about this book go to theUniversity
of South Carolina Press homepage at: http://www.scarolina.edu/uscpress/3201.html